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THE   DISCOVERY 
OF  THE  FUTURE 


THE  DISCOVERY 
OF  THE  FUTURE 


BY 

H.  G.  Wells 


NEW  YORK 
B.    W.     HUEBSCH 

1913 


Copyright,  1913, 
By  B.  W.  HUEBSCH 


Printed  m  U.  S.  A. 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE 
FUTURE* 

By  H.  G.  Wells 

IT  will  lead  into  my  subject  most  con- 
veniently to  contrast  and  separate  two 
divergent  types  of  mind,  types  which 
are  to  be  distinguished  chiefly  by  their  at- 
titude toward  time,  and  more  particularly 
by  the  relative  importance  they  attach  and 
the  relative  amount  of  thought  they  give 
to  the  future. 

The  first  of  these  two  types  of  mind,  and 
it  is,  I  think,  the  predominant  type,  the 
type  of  the  majority  of  living  people,  is 
that  which  seems  scarcely  to  think  of  the 
future  at  all,  which  regards  it  as  a  sort 
of  blank  non-existence  upon  which  the  ad- 


*A  discourse  delivered  at  the  Royal  Institution. 

5 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

vancing  present  will  presently  write  events. 
The  second  type,  which  is,  I  think,  a  more 
modern  and  much  less  abundant  type  of 
mind,  thinks  constantly  and  by  preference 
of  things  to  come,  and  of  present  things 
mainly  in  relation  to  the  results  that  must 
arise  from  them.  The  former  type  of 
mind,  when  one  gets  it  in  its  purity,  is  retro- 
spective in  habit,  and  it  interprets  the 
things  of  the  present,  and  gives  value  to 
this  and  denies  it  to  that,  entirely  with  re- 
lation to  the  past.  The  latter  type  of  mind 
is  constructive  in  habit,  it  interprets  the 
things  of  the  present  and  gives  value  to 
this  or  that,  entirely  in  relation  to  things 
designed  or  foreseen. 

While  from  that  former  point  of  view 
our  life  is  simply  to  reap  the  consequences 
of  the  past,  from  this  our  life  is  to  prepare 
the  future.  The  former  type  one  might 
speak  of  as  the  legal  or  submissive  type  of 
mind,  because  the  business,  the  practice, 
and  the  training  of  a  lawyer  dispose  him 

6 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

toward  it;  he  of  all  men  must  constantly 
refer  to  the  law  made,  the  right  established, 
the  precedent  set,  and  consistently  ignore 
or  condemn  the  thing  that  is  only  seeking 
to  establish  itself.  The  latter  type  of  mind 
I  might  for  contrast  call  the  legislative, 
creative,  organizing,  or  masterful  type,  be- 
cause it  is  perpetually  attacking  and  alter- 
ing the  established  order  of  things,  perpetu- 
ally falling  away  from  respect  for  what  the 
past  has  given  us.  It  sees  the  world  as  one 
great  workshop,  and  the  present  is  no  more 
than  material  for  the  future,  for  the  thing 
that  is  yet  destined  to  be.  It  is  in  the  active 
mood  of  thought,  while  the  former  is  in  the 
passive;  it  is  the  mind  of  youth,  it  is  the 
mind  more  manifest  among  the  western  na- 
tions, while  the  former  is  the  mind  of  age, 
the  mind  of  the  oriental. 

Things  have  been,  says  the  legal  mind, 
and  so  we  are  here.  The  creative  mind  says 
we  are  here  because  things  have  yet  to  be. 

Now  I  do  not  wish  to  suggest  that  the 
7 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF   THE   FUTURE 

great  mass  of  people  belong  to  either  of 
these  two  types.  Indeed,  I  speak  of  them 
as  two  distinct  and  distinguishable  types 
mainly  for  convenience  and  in  order  to 
accentuate  their  distinction.  There  are 
probably  very  few  people  who  brood  con- 
stantly upon  the  past  without  any  thought 
of  the  future  at  all,  and  there  are  probably 
scarcely  any  who  live  and  think  consistently 
in  relation  to  the  future.  The  great  mass 
of  people  occupy  an  intermediate  position 
between  these  extremes,  they  pass  daily  and 
hourly  from  the  passive  mood  to  the  active, 
they  see  this  thing  in  relation  to  its  associa- 
tions and  that  thing  in  relation  to  its  conse- 
quences, and  they  do  not  even  suspect  that 
they  are  using  two  distinct  methods  in  their 
minds. 

But  for  all  that  they  are  distinct  meth- 
ods, the  method  of  reference  to  the  past 
and  the  method  of  reference  to  the  future, 
and  their  mingling  in  many  of  our  minds 
no  more  abolishes  their  difference  than  the 

8 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

existence   of    piebald   horses   proves    that 
white  is  black. 

I  believe  that  it  is  not  sufficiently  recog- 
nized just  how  different  in  their  conse- 
quences these  two  methods  are,  and  just 
where  their  difference  and  where  the  fail- 
ure to  appreciate  their  difference  takes  one. 
This  present  time  is  a  period  of  quite  ex- 
traordinary uncertainty  and  indecision 
upon  endless  questions — moral  questions, 
SBSthetic  questions,  religious  and  political 
questions — upon  which  we  should  all  of  us 
be  happier  to  feel  assured  and  settled;  and 
a  very  large  amount  of  this  floating  uncer- 
tainty about  these  important  matters  is  due 
to  the  fact  that  with  most  of  us  these  two 
insufficiently  distinguished  ways  of  looking 
at  things  are  not  only  present  together,  but 
in  actual  conflict  in  our  minds,  in  unsus- 
pected conflict;  we  pass  from  one  to  the 
other  heedlessly  without  any  clear  recog- 
nition of  the  fundamental  difference  in 
conclusions  that  exists  between  the  two,  and 

9 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

we  do  this  with  disastrous  results  to  our 
confidence  and  to  our  consistency  in  deal- 
ing with  all  sorts  of  things. 

But  before  pointing  out  how  divergent 
these  two  types  or  habits  of  mind  really 
are,  it  is  necessary  to  meet  a  possible  ob- 
jection to  what  has  been  said.  I  may  put 
that  objection  in  this  form :  Is  not  this  dis- 
tinction between  a  type  of  mind  that  thinks 
of  the  past  and  a  type  of  mind  that  thinks 
of  the  future  a  sort  of  hair-splitting,  al- 
most like  distinguishing  between  people 
who  have  left  hands  and  people  who  have 
right?  Everybody  believes  that  the  pres- 
ent is  entirely  determined  by  the  past,  you 
say;  but  then  everybody  believes  also  that 
the  present  determines  the  future.  Are  we 
simply  separating  and  contrasting  two  sides 
of  everybody's  opinion?  To  which  one  re- 
plies that  we  are  not  discussing  what  we 
know  and  believe  about  the  relations  of 
past,  present,  and  future,  or  of  the  relation 
of  cause  and  effect  to  each  other  in  time. 

lO 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

We  all  know  the  present  depends  for  its 
causes  on  the  past,  and  the  future  depends 
for  its  causes  upon  the  present.  But  this 
discussion  concerns  the  way  in  which  we 
approach  things  upon  this  common  ground 
of  knowledge  and  belief.  We  may  all  know 
there  is  an  east  and  a  west,  but  if  some  of  us 
always  approach  and  look  at  things  from 
the  west,  if  some  of  us  always  approach  and 
look  at  things  from  the  east,  and  if  others 
again  wander  about  with  a  pretty  disregard 
of  direction,  looking  at  things  as  chance  de- 
termines, some  of  us  will  get  to  a  westward 
conclusion  of  this  journey,  and  some  of  us 
will  get  to  an  eastward  conclusion,  and 
some  of  us  will  get  to  no  definite  conclusion 
at  all  about  all  sorts  of  important  matters. 
And  yet  those  who  are  travelling  east,  and 
those  who  are  travelling  west,  and  those 
who  are  wandering  haphazard,  may  be  all 
upon  the  same  ground  of  belief  and  state- 
ment and  amid  the  same  assembly  of  proven 
facts.  Precisely  the  same  thing,  divergence 
II 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF   THE   FUTURE 

of  result,  will  happen  if  you  always  ap- 
proach things  from  the  point  of  view  of 
their  causes,  or  if  you  approach  them  al- 
ways with  a  view  to  their  probable  effects. 
And  in  several  very  important  groups  of 
human  affairs  it  is  possible  to  show  quite 
clearly  just  how  widely  apart  the  two 
methods,  pursued  each  in  its  purity,  take 
those  who  follow  them. 

I  suppose  that  three  hundred  years  ago 
all  people  who  thought  at  all  about  moral 
questions,  about  questions  of  Right  and 
Wrong,  deduced  their  rules  of  conduct  ab- 
solutely and  unreservedly  from  the  past, 
from  some  dogmatic  injunction,  some 
finally  settled  decree.  The  great  mass  of 
people  do  so  to-day.  It  is  written,  they 
say.  "Thou  shalt  not  steal,"  for  example — 
that  is  the  sole,  complete,  sufficient  reason 
why  you  should  not  steal,  and  even  to-day 
there  is  a  strong  aversion  to  admit  that 
there  is  any  relation  between  the  actual 
consequences  of  acts  and  the  imperatives  of 

13 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF   THE   FUTURE 

right  and  wrong.  Our  lives  are  to  reap  the 
fruits  of  determinate  things,  and  it  is  still  a 
fundamental  presumption  of  the  estab- 
lished morality  that  one  must  do  right 
though  the  heavens  fall.  But  there  are  peo- 
ple coming  into  this  world  who  would  re- 
fuse to  call  it  Right  if  it  brought  the  heav- 
ens about  our  heads,  however  authoritative 
its  sources  and  sanctions,  and  this  new  dis- 
position is,  I  believe,  a  growing  one.  I  sup- 
pose in  all  ages  people  in  a  timid,  hesitating, 
guilty  way  have  tempered  the  austerity  of  a 
dogmatic  moral  code  by  small  infractions 
to  secure  obviously  kindly  ends,  but  it  was, 
I  am  told,  the  Jesuits  who  first  deliberately 
sought  to  qualify  the  moral  interpretation 
of  acts  by  a  consideration  of  their  results. 
To-day  there  are  few  people  who  have 
not  more  or  less  clearly  discovered  the  fu- 
ture as  a  more  or  less  important  factor  in 
moral  considerations.  To-day  there  is  a 
certain  small  proportion  of  people  who 
frankly  regard  morality  as  a  means  to  an 
13 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

end,  as  an  overriding  of  immediate  and 
personal  considerations  out  of  regard  to 
something  to  be  attained  in  the  future,  and 
who  break  away  altogether  from  the  idea 
of  a  code  dogmatically  established  forever. 
Most  of  us  are  not  so  definite  as  that,  but 
most  of  us  are  deeply  tinged  with  the  spirit 
of  compromise  between  the  past  and  the 
future;  we  profess  an  unbounded  alle- 
giance to  the  prescriptions  of  the  past,  and 
we  practise  a  general  observance  of  its  in- 
junctions, but  we  qualify  to  a  vague,  vari- 
able extent  with  considerations  of  expedi- 
ency. We  hold,  for  example,  that  we  must 
respect  our  promises.  But  suppose  we  find 
unexpectedly  that  for  one  of  us  to  keep  a 
promise,  which  has  been  sealed  and  sworn 
in  the  most  sacred  fashion,  must  lead  to 
the  great  suffering  of  some  other  human 
being,  must  lead,  in  fact,  to  practical  evil? 
Would  a  man  do  right  or  wrong  if  he 
broke  such  a  promise?  The  practical  de- 
cision most  modern   people  would  make 

14 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

would  be  to  break  the  promise.  Most 
would  say  that  they  did  evil  to  avoid  a 
greater  evil.  But  suppose  it  was  not  such 
very  great  suffering  we  were  going  to  in- 
flict, but  only  some  suffering?  And  sup- 
pose it  was  a  rather  important  promise? 
With  most  of  us  it  would  then  come  to  be 
a  matter  of  weighing  the  promise,  the 
thing  of  the  past,  against  this  unexpected 
bad  consequence,  the  thing  of  the  future. 
And  the  smaller  the  overplus  of  evil  conse- 
quences the  more  most  of  us  would  vacil- 
late. But  neither  of  the  two  types  of  mind 
we  are  contrasting  would  vacillate  at  all. 
The  legal  type  of  mind  would  obey  the 
past  unhesitatingly,  the  creative  would  un- 
hesitatingly sacrifice  it  to  the  future.  The 
legal  mind  would  say,  "they  who  break  the 
law  at  any  point  break  it  altogether,"  while 
the  creative  mind  would  say,  "let  the  dead 
past  bury  its  dead." 

It  is  convenient  to  take  my  illustration 
from  the  sphere  of  promises,  but  it  is  in  the 
15 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

realm  of  sexual  morality  that  the  two 
methods  are  most  acutely  in  conflict. 

And  I  would  like  to  suggest  that  until 
you  have  definitely  determined  either  to 
obey  the  real  or  imaginary  imperatives  of 
the  past,  or  to  set  yourself  toward  the  de- 
mands of  some  ideal  of  the  future,  until 
you  have  made  up  your  mind  to  adhere  to 
one  or  other  of  these  two  types  of  mental 
action  in  these  matters,  you  are  not  even 
within  hope  of  a  sustained  consistency  in 
the  thought  that  underlies  your  acts,  that 
in  every  issue  of  principle  that  comes  upon 
you,  you  will  be  entirely  at  the  mercy  of 
the  intellectual  mood  that  happens  to  be 
ascendent  at  that  particular  moment  in 
your  mind. 

In  the  sphere  of  public  affairs  also  these 
two  ways  of  looking  at  things  work  out 
into  equally  divergent  and  incompatible 
consequences.  The  legal  mind  insists  upon 
treaties,  constitutions,  legitimacies,  and 
charters;  the  legislative  incessantly  assails 

i6 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

these.  Whenever  some  period  of  stress  sets 
in,  some  great  conflict  between  institutions 
and  the  forces  in  things,  there  comes  a  sort- 
ing out  of  these  two  types  of  mind.  The 
legal  mind  becomes  glorified  and  trans- 
figured in  the  form  of  hopeless  loyalty,  the 
creative  mind  inspires  revolutions  and  re- 
constructions. And  particularly  is  this 
difference  of  attitude  accentuated  in  the 
disputes  that  arise  out  of  wars.  In  most 
modern  wars  there  is  no  doubt  quite  trace- 
able on  one  side  or  the  other  a  distinct 
creative  idea,  a  distinct  regard  for  some 
future  consequence;  but  the  main  dispute 
even  in  most  modern  wars  and  the  sole 
dispute  in  most  mediaeval  wars  will  be 
found  to  be  a  reference,  not  to  the  future, 
but  to  the  past;  to  turn  upon  a  question  of 
fact  and  right.  The  wars  of  Plantagenet 
and  Lancastrian  England  with  France,  for 
example,  were  based  entirely  upon  a 
dummy  claim,  supported  by  obscure  legal 
arguments,  upon  the  crown  of  France. 
17 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

And  the  arguments  that  centered  about  the 
late  war  in  South  Africa  ignored  any  ideal 
of  a  great  united  South  African  state  al- 
most entirely,  and  quibbled  this  way  and 
that  about  who  began  the  fighting  and  what 
was  or  was  not  written  in  some  obscure  re- 
vision of  a  treaty  a  score  of  years  ago.  Yet 
beneath  the  legal  issues  the  broad  creative 
idea  has  been  apparent  in  the  public  mind 
during  this  war.  It  will  be  found  more  or 
less  definitely  formulated  beneath  almost 
all  the  great  wars  of  the  past  century,  and  a 
comparison  of  the  wars  of  the  nineteenth 
century  with  the  wars  of  the  middle  ages 
will  show,  I  think,  that  in  this  field  also 
there  has  been  a  discovery  of  the  future,  an 
increasing  disposition  to  shift  the  reference 
and  values  from  things  accomplished  to 
things  to  come. 

Yet  though  foresight  creeps  into  our 
politics  and  a  reference  to  consequence  into 
our  morality,  it  is  still  the  past  that  domi- 
nates our  lives.    But  why?    Why  are  we  so 

i8 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

bound  to  it?  It  is  into  the  future  we  go, 
to-morrow  is  the  eventful  thing  for  us. 
There  lies  all  that  remains  to  be  felt  by  us 
and  our  children  and  all  those  that  are 
dear  to  us.  Yet  we  marshal  and  order  men 
into  classes  entirely  with  regard  to  the 
past;  we  draw  shame  and  honor  out  of  the 
past;  against  the  rights  of  property,  the 
vested  interests,  the  agreements  and  estab- 
lishments of  the  past  the  future  has  no 
rights.  Literature  is  for  the  most  part  his- 
tory or  history  at  one  remove,  and  what  is 
culture  but  a  mold  of  interpretation  into 
which  new  things  are  thrust,  a  collection  of 
standards,  a  sort  of  bed  of  King  Og,  to 
which  all  new  expressions  must  be  lopped 
or  stretched?  Our  conveniences,  like  our 
thoughts,  are  all  retrospective.  We  travel 
on  roads  so  narrow  that  they  suffocate  our 
traffic;  we  live  in  uncomfortable,  incon- 
venient, life-wasting  houses  out  of  a  love  of 
familiar  shapes  and  familiar  customs  and 
a  dread  of  strangeness;  all  our  public  af- 
19 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF   THE   FUTURE 

fairs  are  cramped  by  local  boundaries  im- 
possibly restricted  and  small.  Our  cloth- 
ing, our  habits  of  speech,  our  spelling,  our 
weights  and  measures,  our  coinage,  our  re- 
ligious and  political  theories,  all  witness  to 
the  binding  power  of  the  past  upon  our 
minds.  Yet  we  do  not  serve  the  past  as  the 
Chinese  have  done.  There  are  degrees. 
We  do  not  worship  our  ancestors  or  pre- 
scribe a  rigid  local  costume;  we  dare  to 
enlarge  our  stock  of  knowledge,  and  we 
qualify  the  classics  with  occasional  adven- 
tures into  original  thought.  Compared 
with  the  Chinese  we  are  distinctly  aware  of 
the  future.  But  compared  with  what  we 
might  be,  the  past  is  all  our  world. 

The  reason  why  the  retrospective  habit, 
the  legal  habit,  is  so  dominant,  and  always 
has  been  so  predominant,  is  of  course  a 
perfectly  obvious  one.  We  follow  a  fun- 
damental human  principle  and  take  what 
we  can  get.  All  people  believe  the  past  is 
certain,  defined,  and  knowable,  and  only  a 

20 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

few  people  believe  that  it  is  possible  to 
know  anything  about  the  future.  Man 
has  acquired  the  habit  of  going  to  the 
past  because  it  was  the  line  of  least  re- 
sistance for  his  mind.  While  a  certain  va- 
riable portion  of  the  past  is  serviceable 
matter  for  knowledge  in  the  case  of  every- 
one, the  future  is,  to  a  mind  without  an 
imagination  trained  in  scientific  habits  of 
thought,  non-existent.  All  our  minds  are 
made  of  memories.  In  our  memories  each 
of  us  has  something  that  without  any  spe- 
cial training  whatever  will  go  back  into  the 
past  and  grip  firmly  and  convincingly  all 
sorts  of  workable  facts,  sometimes  more 
convincingly  than  firmly.  But  the  imagi- 
nation, unless  it  is  strengthened  by  a  very 
sound  training  in  the  laws  of  causation, 
wanders  like  a  lost  child  in  the  blankness 
of  things  to  come  and  returns  empty. 

Many  people  believe,  therefore,  that 
there  can  be  no  sort  of  certainty  about  the 
future.    You  can  know  no  more  about  the 

21 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

future,  I  was  recently  assured  by  a  friend, 
than  you  can  know  which  way  a  kitten  will 
jump  next.  And  to  all  who  hold  that  view, 
who  regard  the  future  as  a  perpetual 
source  of  convulsive  surprises,  as  an  im- 
penetrable, incurable,  perpetual  blankness, 
it  is  right  and  reasonable  to  derive  such 
values  as  it  is  necessary  to  attach  to  things 
from  the  events  that  have  certainly  hap- 
pened with  regard  to  them.  It  is  our  ig- 
norance of  the  future  and  our  persuasion 
that  that  ignorance  is  absolutely  incurable 
that  alone  gives  the  past  its  enormous  pre- 
dominance in  our  thoughts.  But  through 
the  ages,  the  long  unbroken  succession  of 
fortune-tellers — and  they  flourish  still — 
witnesses  to  the  perpetually  smoldering 
feeling  that  after  all  there  may  be  a  better 
sort  of  knowledge — a  more  serviceable  sort 
of  knowledge  than  that  we  now  possess. 

On  the  whole  there  is  something  sympa- 
thetic for  the  dupe  of  the  fortune-teller  in 
the  spirit  of  modern  science;  it  is  one  of 

22 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

the  persuasions  that  come  into  one's  mind, 
as  one  assimilates  the  broad  conception  of 
science,  that  the  adequacy  of  causation  is 
universal;  that  in  absolute  fact — if  not  in 
that  little  bubble  of  relative  fact  which 
constitutes  the  individual  life — in  absolute 
fact  the  future  is  just  as  fixed  and  deter- 
minate, just  as  settled  and  inevitable,  just 
as  possible  a  matter  of  knowledge  as  the 
past.  Our  personal  memory  gives  us  an 
impression  of  the  superior  reality  and  trust- 
worthiness of  things  in  the  past,  as  of 
things  that  have  finally  committed  them- 
selves and  said  their  say,  but  the  more 
clearly  we  master  the  leading  conceptions 
of  science  the  better  we  understand  that 
this  impression  is  one  of  the  results  of  the 
peculiar  conditions  of  our  lives,  and  not 
an  absolute  truth.  The  man  of  science 
comes  to  believe  at  last  that  the  events  of 
the  year  A.D.  4000  are  as  fixed,  settled, 
and  unchangeable  as  the  events  of  the  year 
1600.  Only  about  the  latter  he  has  some 
23 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

material  for  belief  and  about  the  former 
practically  none. 

And  the  question  arises  how  far  this  ab- 
solute ignorance  of  the  future  is  a  fixed  and 
necessary  condition  of  human  life,  and  how 
far  some  application  of  intellectual  methods 
may  not  attenuate  even  if  it  does  not  abso- 
lutely set  aside  the  veil  between  ourselves 
and  things  to  come.  And  I  am  venturing 
to  suggest  to  you  that  along  certain  lines  and 
with  certain  qualifications  and  limitations  a 
working  knowledge  of  things  in  the  future 
is  a  possible  and  practicable  thing.  And  in 
order  to  support  this  suggestion  I  would 
call  your  attention  to  certain  facts  about  our 
knowledge  of  the  past,  and  more  particu- 
larly I  would  insist  upon  this,  that  about  the 
past  our  range  of  absolute  certainty  is  very 
limited  indeed.  About  the  past  I  would 
suggest  we  are  inclined  to  overestimate  our 
certainty,  just  as  I  think  we  are  inclined  to 
underestimate  the  certainties  of  the  future. 
And  such  a  knowledge  of  the  past  as  we 
24 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

have  is  not  all  of  the  same  sort  or  derived 
from  the  same  sources. 

Let  us  consider  just  what  an  educated 
man  of  to-day  knows  of  the  past.  First  of 
all  he  has  the  realest  of  all  knowledge — the 
knowledge  of  his  own  personal  experi- 
ences, his  memory.  Uneducated  people 
believe  their  memories  absolutely,  and  most 
educated  people  believe  them  with  a  few 
reservations.  Some  of  us  take  up  a  critical 
attitude  even  toward  our  own  memories; 
we  know  that  they  not  only  sometimes  drop 
things  out,  but  that  sometimes  a  sort  of 
dreaming  or  a  strong  suggestion  will  put 
things  in.  But  for  all  that,  memory  re- 
mains vivid  and  real  as  no  other  knowledge 
can  be,  and  to  have  seen  and  heard  and  felt 
is  to  be  nearest  to  absolute  conviction.  Yet 
our  memory  of  direct  impressions  is  only 
the  smallest  part  of  what  we  know.  Out- 
side that  bright  area  comes  knowledge  of 
a  different  order — the  knowledge  brought 
to  us  by  other  people.  Outside  our  imme- 
25 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

diate  personal  memory  there  comes  this 
wider  area  of  facts  or  quasi  facts  told  us  by 
more  or  less  trustworthy  people,  told  us  by 
word  of  mouth  or  by  the  written  word  of 
living  and  of  dead  writers.  This  is  the 
past  of  report,  rumor,  tradition,  and  his- 
tory— the  second  sort  of  knowledge  of  the 
past.  The  nearer  knowledge  of  this  sort  is 
abundant  and  clear  and  detailed,  remoter 
it  becomes  vaguer,  still  more  remotely  in 
time  and  space  it  dies  down  to  brief,  im- 
perfect inscriptions  and  enigmatical  tradi- 
tions, and  at  last  dies  away,  so  far  as  the 
records  and  traditions  of  humanity  go,  into 
a  doubt  and  darkness  as  blank,  just  as 
blank,  as  futurity. 

And  now  let  me  remind  you  that  this 
second  zone  of  knowledge  outside  the 
bright  area  of  what  we  have  felt  and  wit- 
nessed and  handled  for  ourselves — this 
zone  of  hearsay  and  history  and  tradition 
— completed  the  whole  knowledge  of  the 
past  that  was  accessible  to  Shakespeare,  for 
26 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

example.  To  these  limits  man's  knowledge 
of  the  past  was  absolutely  confined,  save  for 
some  inklings  and  guesses,  save  for  some 
small,  almost  negligible  beginnings,  until 
the  nineteenth  century  began.  Besides  the 
correct  knowledge  in  this  scheme  of  hear- 
say and  history  a  man  had  a  certain 
amount  of  legend  and  error  that  rounded 
off  the  picture  in  a  very  satisfactory  and 
misleading  way,  according  to  Bishop 
Ussher,  just  exactly  4004  years  B.C.  And 
that  was  man's  universal  history — that  was 
his  all — until  the  scientific  epoch  began. 
And  beyond  those  limits — ?  Well,  I  sup- 
pose the  educated  man  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury was  as  certain  of  the  non-existence  of 
anything  before  the  creation  of  the  world 
as  he  was,  and  as  most  of  us  are  still,  of 
the  practical  non-existence  of  the  future, 
or  at  any  rate  he  was  as  satisfied  of  the  im- 
possibility of  knowledge  in  the  one  direc- 
tion as  in  the  other. 

But  modern  science,  that  is  to  say  the 
27 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF   THE    FUTURE 

relentless  systematic  criticism  of  phenom- 
ena, has  in  the  past  hundred  years  absolute- 
ly destroyed  the  conception  of  a  finitely 
distant  beginning  of  things;  has  abolished 
such  limits  to  the  past  as  a  dated  creation 
set,  and  added  an  enormous  vista  to  that 
limited  sixteenth  century  outlook.  And 
what  I  would  insist  upon  is  that  this  fur- 
ther knowledge  is  a  new  kind  of  knowl- 
edge, obtained  in  a  new  kind  of  way.  We 
know  to-day,  quite  as  confidently  and  in 
many  respects  more  intimately  than  we 
know  Sargon  or  Zenobia  or  Caractacus, 
the  form  and  the  habits  of  creatures  that  no 
living  being  has  ever  met,  that  no  human 
eye  has  ever  regarded,  and  the  character  of 
scenery  that  no  man  has  ever  seen  or  can 
ever  possibly  see;  we  picture  to  ourselves 
the  labyrinthodon  raising  its  clumsy  head 
above  the  water  of  the  carboniferous 
swamps  in  which  he  lived,  and  we  figure 
the  pterodactyls,  those  great  bird  lizards, 
flapping  their  way  athwart  the  forests  of 
28 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF   THE   FUTURE 

the  Mesozoic  age  with  exactly  the  same 
certainty  as  that  with  which  we  picture  the 
rhinoceros  or  the  vulture.  I  doubt  no 
more  about  the  facts  in  this  farther  picture 
than  I  do  about  those  in  the  nearest.  I  be- 
lieve in  the  megatherium  which  I  have 
never  seen  as  confidently  as  I  believe  in  the 
hippopotamus  that  has  engulfed  buns  from 
my  hand.  A  vast  amount  of  detail  in  that 
farther  picture  is  now  fixed  and  finite  for  all 
time.  And  a  countless  number  of  investi- 
gators are  persistently  and  confidently  en- 
larging, amplifying,  correcting,  and  push- 
ing farther  and  farther  back  the  boundaries 
of  this  greater  past — this  prehuman  past — 
that  the  scientific  criticism  of  existing  phe- 
nomena has  discovered  and  restored  and 
brought  for  the  first  time  into  the  world 
of  human  thought.  We  have  become  pos- 
sessed of  a  new  and  once  unsuspected  his- 
tory of  the  world — of  which  all  the  history 
that  was  known,  for  example,  to  Dr.  John- 
son is  only  the  brief  concluding  chapter; 
29 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF   THE   FUTURE 

and  even  that  concluding  chapter  has  been 
greatly  enlarged  and  corrected  by  the  ex- 
ploring archaeologists  working  strictly  up- 
on the  lines  of  the  new  method — that  is  to 
say,  the  comparison  and  criticism  of  sug- 
gestive facts. 

I  want  particularly  to  insist  upon  this, 
that  all  this  outer  past — this  non-historical 
past — is  the  product  of  a  new  and  keener 
habit  of  inquiry,  and  no  sort  of  revelation. 
It  is  simply  due  to  a  new  and  more  critical 
way  of  looking  at  things.  Our  knowledge 
of  the  geological  past,  clear  and  definite  as 
it  has  become,  is  of  a  different  and  lower 
order  than  the  knowledge  of  our  memory, 
and  yet  of  a  quite  practicable  and  trust- 
worthy order — a  knowledge  good  enough 
to  go  upon ;  and  if  one  were  to  speak  of  the 
private  memory  as  the  personal  past,  of  the 
next  wider  area  of  knowledge  as  the  tra- 
ditional or  historical  past,  then  one  might 
call    all    that   great   and    inspiring   back- 

30 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

ground  of  remoter  geological  time  the  in- 
ductive past. 

And  this  great  discovery  of  the  inductive 
past  was  got  by  the  discussion  and  redis- 
cussion  and  effective  criticism  of  a  number 
of  existing  facts,  odd-shaped  lumps  of 
stone,  streaks  and  bandings  in  quarries  and 
cliffs,  anatomical  and  developmental  detail 
that  had  always  been  about  in  the  world, 
that  had  been  lying  at  the  feet  of  mankind 
so  long  as  mankind  had  existed,  but  that  no 
one  had  ever  dreamed  before  could  supply 
any  information  at  all,  much  more  reveal 
such  astounding  and  enlightening  vistas. 
Looked  at  in  a  new  way  they  became 
sources  of  dazzling  and  penetrating  light. 
The  remoter  past  lit  up  and  became  a  pic- 
ture. Considered  as  effects,  compared  and 
criticised,  they  yielded  a  clairvoyant  vision 
of  the  history  of  interminable  years. 

And  now,  if  it  has  been  possible  for  men 
by  picking  out  a  number  of  suggestive  and 
significant  looking  things  in  the  present,  by 
31 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE    FUTURE 

comparing  them,  criticising  them,  and  dis- 
cussing them,  with  a  perpetual  insistence 
upon  "Why?"  without  any  guiding  tradi- 
tion, and  indeed  in  the  teeth  of  established 
beliefs,  to  construct  this  amazing  search- 
light of  inference  into  the  remoter  past,  is 
it  really,  after  all,  such  an  extravagant  and 
hopeless  thing  to  suggest  that,  by  seeking 
for  operating  causes  instead  of  for  fossils, 
and  by  criticising  them  as  persistently  and 
thoroughly  as  the  geological  record  has 
been  criticised,  it  may  be  possible  to  throw 
a  searchlight  of  inference  forward  instead 
of  backward,  and  to  attain  to  a  knowledge 
of  coming  things  as  clear,  as  universally 
convincing,  and  infinitely  more  important 
to  mankind  than  the  clear  vision  of  the 
past  that  geology  has  opened  to  us  during 
the  nineteenth  century? 

Let  us  grant  that  anything  to  correspond 
with  the  memory,  anything  having  the 
same  relation  to  the  future  that  memory 
has  to  the  past,  is  out  of  the  question.    We 

32 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

cannot  imagine,  of  course,  that  we  can  ever 
know  any  personal  future  to  correspond 
with  our  personal  past,  or  any  traditional 
future  to  correspond  with  our  traditional 
past;  but  the  possibility  of  an  inductive  fu- 
ture to  correspond  with  that  great  induc- 
tive past  of  geology  and  archaeology  is  an 
altogether  different  thing. 

I  must  confess  that  I  believe  quite  firmly 
that  an  inductive  knowledge  of  a  great 
number  of  things  in  the  future  is  becoming 
a  human  possibility.  I  believe  that  the  time 
is  drawing  near  when  it  will  be  possible 
to  suggest  a  systematic  exploration  of  the 
future.  And  you  must  not  judge  the  prac- 
ticability of  this  enterprise  by  the  failures 
of  the  past.  So  far  nothing  has  been  at- 
tempted, so  far  no  first-class  mind  has  ever 
focused  itself  upon  these  issues;  but  suppose 
the  laws  of  social  and  political  develop- 
ment, for  example,  were  given  as  many 
brains,  were  given  as  much  attention,  criti- 
cism, and  discussion  as  we  have  given  to  the 
33 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

laws  of  chemical  combination  during  the 
last  fifty  years,  what  might  we  not  expect? 

To  the  popular  mind  of  to-day  there  is 
something  very  difficult  in  such  a  sugges- 
tion, soberly  made.  But  here,  in  this  insti- 
tution (the  Royal  Institution  of  London) 
which  has  watched  for  a  whole  century  over 
the  splendid  adolescence  of  science,  and 
where  the  spirit  of  science  is  surely  under- 
stood, you  will  know  that  as  a  matter  of 
fact  prophecy  has  always  been  inseparably 
associated  with  the  idea  of  scientific  re- 
search. 

The  popular  idea  of  scientific  investiga- 
tion is  a  vehement,  aimless  collection  of 
little  facts,  collected  as  a  bower  bird  col- 
lects shells  and  pebbles,  in  methodical  little 
rows,  and  out  of  this  process,  in  some  man- 
ner unknown  to  the  popular  mind,  certain 
conjuring  tricks — the  celebrated  "wonders 
of  science" — in  a  sort  of  accidental  way 
emerge.  The  popular  conception  of  all 
discovery  is  accident     But  you  will  know 

34 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

that  the  essential  thing  in  the  scientific  pro- 
cess is  not  the  collection  of  facts,  but  the 
analysis  of  facts.  Facts  are  the  raw  mate- 
rial and  not  the  substance  of  science.  It 
is  analysis  that  has  given  us  all  ordered 
knowledge,  and  you  know  that  the  aim  and 
the  test  and  the  justification  of  the  scientific 
process  is  not  a  marketable  conjuring  trick, 
but  prophecy.  Until  a  scientific  theory 
yields  confident  forecasts  you  know  it  is  un- 
sound and  tentative;  it  is  mere  theorizing, 
as  evanescent  as  art  talk  or  the  phantoms 
politicians  talk  about.  The  splendid  body 
of  gravitational  astronomy,  for  example,  es- 
tablishes itself  upon  the  certain  forecast  of 
stellar  movements,  and  you  would  absolute- 
ly refuse  to  believe  its  amazing  assertions  if 
it  were  not  for  these  same  unerring  fore- 
casts. The  whole  body  of  medical  science 
aims,  and  claims  the  ability,  to  diagnose. 
Meteorology  constantly  and  persistently 
aims  at  prophecy,  and  it  will  never  stand  in 
a  place  of  honor  until  it  can  certainly  fore- 
35 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF   THE    FUTURE 

tell.  The  chemist  forecasts  elements  before 
he  meets  them — it  is  very  properly  his  boast 
= — and  the  splendid  manner  in  which  the 
mind  of  Clerk  Maxwell  reached  in  front  of 
all  experiments  and  foretold  those  things 
that  Marconi  has  materialized  is  familiar 
to  us  all. 

All  applied  mathematics  resolves  into 
computation  to  foretell  things  which  other- 
wise can  only  be  determined  by  trial.  Even 
in  so  unscientific  a  science  as  economics 
there  have  been  forecasts.  And  if  I  am 
right  in  saying  that  science  aims  at  proph- 
ecy, and  if  the  specialist  in  each  science  is  in 
fact  doing  his  best  now  to  prophesy  within 
the  limits  of  his  field,  what  is  there  to  stand 
in  the  way  of  our  building  up  this  growing 
body  of  forecast  into  an  ordered  picture  of 
the  future  that  will  be  just  as  certain,  just 
as  strictly  science,  and  perhaps  just  as  de- 
tailed as  the  picture  that  has  been  built  up 
within  the  last  hundred  years  of  the  geolog- 
ical past?    Well,  so  far  and  until  we  bring 

36 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

the  prophecy  down  to  the  affairs  of  man 
and  his  children,  it  is  just  as  possible 
to  carry  induction  forward  as  back;  it  is 
just  as  simple  and  sure  to  work  out  the 
changing  orbit  of  the  earth  in  the  future 
until  the  tidal  drag  hauls  one  unchanging 
face  at  last  toward  the  sun  as  it  is  to  work 
back  to  its  blazing  and  molten  past.  Un- 
til man  comes  in,  the  inductive  future 
is  as  real  and  convincing  as  the  inductive 
past.  But  inorganic  forces  are  the  smaller 
part  and  the  minor  interest  in  this  concern. 
Directly  man  becomes  a  factor  the  nature 
of  the  problem  changes,  and  our  whole 
present  interest  centers  on  the  question 
whether  man  is,  indeed,  individually  and 
collectively  incalculable,  a  new  element 
which  entirely  alters  the  nature  of  our  in- 
quiry and  stamps  it  at  once  as  vain  and 
hopeless,  or  whether  his  presence  compli- 
cates, but  does  not  alter,  the  essential  na- 
ture of  the  induction.  How  far  may  we 
37 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF   THE   FUTURE 

hope  to  get  trustworthy  inductions  about 
the  future  of  man? 

Well,  I  think,  on  the  whole,  we  are  in- 
clined to  underrate  our  chance  of  certain- 
ties in  the  future,  just  as  I  think  we  are  in- 
clined to  be  too  credulous  about  the  histor- 
ical past.  The  vividness  of  our  personal 
memories,  which  are  the  very  essence  of 
reality  to  us,  throws  a  glamor  of  conviction 
over  tradition  and  past  inductions.  But 
the  personal  future  must  in  the  very  nature 
of  things  be  hidden  from  us  so  long  as  time 
endures,  and  this  black  ignorance  at  our 
very  feet — this  black  shadow  that  corre- 
sponds to  the  brightness  of  our  memories 
behind  us — throws  a  glamor  of  uncertainty 
and  unreality  over  all  the  future.  We  are 
continually  surprising  ourselves  by  our 
own  will  or  want  of  will;  the  individual- 
ities about  us  are  continually  producing 
the  unexpected,  and  it  is  very  natural  to 
reason  that  as  we  can  never  be  precisely 
sure  before  the  time  comes  what  we  are  go- 

38 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

ing  to  do  and  feel,  and  if  we  can  never 
count  with  absolute  certainty  upon  the  acts 
and  happenings  even  of  our  most,  intimate 
friends,  how  much  the  more  impossible  is 
it  to  anticipate  the  behavior  in  any  direc- 
tion of  states  and  communities. 

In  reply  to  which  I  would  advance  the 
suggestion  that  an  increase  in  the  number 
of  human  beings  considered  may  positively 
simplify  the  case  instead  of  complicating 
it;  that  as  the  individuals  increase  in  num- 
ber they  begin  to  average  out.  Let  me  il- 
lustrate this  point  by  a  comparison.  An- 
gular pit-sand  has  grains  of  the  most  varied 
shapes.  Examined  microscopically,  you 
will  find  all  sorts  of  angles  and  outlines 
and  variations.  Before  you  look  you  can 
say  of  no  particular  grain  what  its  out- 
line will  be.  And  if  you  shoot  a  load  of 
such  sand  from  a  cart  you  cannot  foretell 
with  any  certainty  where  any  particular 
grain  will  be  in  the  heap  that  you  make; 
but  you  can  tell — you  can  tell  pretty  defi- 
39 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

nitely — the  form  of  the  heap  as  a  whole. 
And  further,  if  you  pass  that  sand  through 
a  series  of  shoots  and  finally  drop  it  some 
distance  to  the  ground,  you  will  be  able  to 
foretell  that  grains  of  a  certain  sort  of 
form  and  size  will  for  the  most  part  be 
found  in  one  part  of  the  heap  and  grains 
of  another  sort  of  form  and  size  will  be 
found  in  another  part  of  the  heap.  In 
such  a  case,  you  see,  the  thing  as  a  whole 
may  be  simpler  than  its  component  parts, 
and  this  I  submit  is  also  the  case  in  many 
human  affairs.  So  that  because  the  individ- 
ual future  eludes  us  completely  that  is  no 
reason  why  we  should  not  aspire  to,  and  dis- 
cover and  use,  safe  and  serviceable,  gener- 
alizations upon  countless  important  issues 
in  the  human  destiny. 

But  there  is  a  very  grave  and  important- 
looking  difference  between  a  load  of  sand 
and  a  multitude  of  human  beings,  and  this 
I  must  face  and  examine.  Our  thoughts 
and  wills  and  emotions  are  contagious.  An 
40 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

exceptional  sort  of  sand  grain,  a  sand  grain 
that  was  exceptionally  big  and  heavy,  for 
example,  exerts  no  influence  worth  con- 
sidering upon  any  other  of  the  sand  grains 
in  the  load.  They  will  fall  and  roll  and 
heap  themselves  just  the  same  whether  that 
exceptional  grain  is  with  them  or  not;  but 
an  exceptional  man  comes  into  the  world,  a 
Caesar  or  a  Napoleon  or  a  Peter  the  Her- 
mit, and  he  appears  to  persuade  and  con- 
vince and  compel  and  take  entire  posses- 
sion of  the  sand  heap — I  mean  the  com- 
munity— and  to  twist  and  alter  its  desti- 
nies to  an  almost  unlimited  extent.  And 
if  this  is  indeed  the  case,  it  reduces  our 
project  of  an  inductive  knowledge  of  the 
future  to  very  small  limits.  To  hope  to 
foretell  the  birth  and  coming  of  men  of  ex- 
ceptional force  and  genius  is  to  hope  in- 
credibly, and  if,  indeed,  such  exceptional 
men  do  as  much  as  they  seem  to  do  in 
warping  the  path  of  humanity,  our  utmost 
prophetic  limit  in  human  affairs  is  a  con- 
41 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

ditional  sort  of  prophecy.  If  people  do  so 
and  so,  we  can  say,  then  such  and  such  re- 
sults will  follow,  and  we  must  admit  that 
that  is  our  limit. 

But  everybody  does  not  believe  in  the 
importance  of  the  leading  man.  There  are 
those  who  will  say  that  the  whole  world  is 
different  by  reason  of  Napoleon.  There 
are  those  who  will  say  that  the  world  of 
to-day  would  be  very  much  as  it  is  now  if 
Napoleon  had  never  been  born.  Other  men 
would  have  arisen  to  make  Napoleon's  con- 
quests and  codify  the  law,  redistribute  the 
worn-out  boundaries  of  Europe  and  achieve 
all  those  changes  which  we  so  readily 
ascribe  to  Napoleon's  will  alone.  There 
are  those  who  believe  entirely  in  the  indi- 
vidual man  and  those  who  believe  entirely 
in  the  forces  behind  the  individual  man, 
and  for  my  own  part  I  must  confess  my- 
self a  rather  extreme  case  of  the  latter 
kind.  I  must  confess  I  believe  that  if 
by  some  juggling  with  space  and  time 
42 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF   THE    FUTURE 

Julius  Caesar,  Napoleon,  Edward  IV., 
W^illiam  the  Conqueror,  Lord  Rosebery, 
and  Robert  Burns  had  all  been  changed  at 
birth  it  would  not  have  produced  any  se- 
rious dislocation  of  the  course  of  destiny. 
I  believe  that  these  great  men  of  ours  are 
no  more  than  images  and  symbols  and  in- 
struments taken,  as  it  were,  haphazard  by 
the  incessant  and  consistent  forces  behind 
them;  they  are  the  pen-nibs  Fate  has  used 
for  her  writing,  the  diamonds  upon  the 
drill  that  pierces  through  the  rock.  And 
the  more  one  inclines  to  this  trust  in  forces 
the  more  one  will  believe  in  the  possibility 
of  a  reasoned  inductive  view  of  the  future 
that  will  serve  us  in  politics,  in  morals,  in 
social  contrivances,  and  in  a  thousand  spa- 
cious ways.  And  even  those  who  take  the 
most  extreme  and  personal  and  melodra- 
matic view  of  the  ways  of  human  destiny, 
who  see  life  as  a  tissue  of  fairy  godmother 
births  and  accidental  meetings  and  prom- 
ises and  jealousies,  will,  I  suppose,  admit 
43 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE    FUTURE 

there  comes  a  limit  to  these  things — that 
at  last  personality  dies  away  and  the 
greater  forces  come  to  their  own.  The 
great  man,  however  great  he  be,  cannot  set 
back  the  whole  scheme  of  things;  what  he 
does  in  right  and  reason  will  remain,  and 
what  he  does  against  the  greater  creative 
forces  will  perish.  We  cannot  foresee  him ; 
let  us  grant  that.  His  personal  difference, 
the  splendor  of  his  effect,  his  dramatic  ar- 
rangement of  events  will  be  his  own — in 
other  words,  we  cannot  estimate  for  acci- 
dents and  accelerations  and  delays;  but  if 
only  we  throw  our  web  of  generalization 
wide  enough,  if  only  we  spin  our  rope  of 
induction  strong  enough,  the  final  result  of 
the  great  man,  his  ultimate  surviving  conse- 
quences, will  come  within  our  net. 

Such,  then,  is  the  sort  of  knowledge  of 
the  future  that  I  believe  is  attainable  and 
worth  attaining.  I  believe  that  the  delib- 
erate direction  of  historical  study  and  of 
economic  and  social  study  toward  the  fu- 
44 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

ture  and  an  increasing  reference,  a  delib- 
erate and  courageous  reference,  to  the  fu- 
ture in  moral  and  religious  discussion, 
would  be  enormously  stimulating  and 
enormously  profitable  to  our  intellectual 
life.  I  have  done  my  best  to  suggest  to  you 
that  such  an  enterprise  is  now  a  serious  and 
practicable  undertaking.  But  at  the  risk 
of  repetition  I  would  call  your  attention 
to  the  essential  difference  that  must  always 
hold  between  our  attainable  knowledge  of 
the  future  and  our  existing  knowledge  of 
the  past.  The  portion  of  the  past  that  is 
brightest  and  most  real  to  each  of  us  is  the 
individual  past — the  personal  memory. 
The  portion  of  the  future  that  must  re- 
main darkest  and  least  accessible  is  the  in- 
dividual future.  Scientific  prophecy  will 
not  be  fortune-telling,  whatever  else  it 
may  be.  Those  excellent  people  who  cast 
horoscopes,  those  illegal  fashionable  palm- 
reading  ladies  who  abound  so  much  to- 
day, in  whom  nobody  is  so  foolish  as  to 
45 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

believe,  and  to  whom  everybody  is  foolish 
enough  to  go,  need  fear  no  competition 
from  the  scientific  prophets.  The  knowl- 
edge of  the  future  we  may  hope  to  gain 
will  be  general  and  not  individual;  it  will 
be  no  sort  of  knowledge  that  will  either 
hamper  us  in  the  exercise  of  our  individ- 
ual free  will  or  relieve  us  of  our  personal 
responsibility. 

And  now,  how  far  is  it  possible  at  the 
present  time  to  speculate  on  the  particular 
outline  the  future  will  assume  when  it  is 
investigated  in  this  way? 

It  is  interesting,  before  we  answer  that 
question,  to  take  into  account  the  specula- 
tions of  a  certain  sect  and  culture  of  peo- 
ple who  already,  before  the  middle  of  last 
century,  had  set  their  faces  toward  the  fu- 
ture as  the  justifying  explanation  of  the 
present.  These  were  the  positivists,  whose 
position  is  still  most  eloquently  maintained 
and  displayed  by  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison, 
46 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

in  spite  of  the  great  expansion  of  the  hu- 
man outlook  that  has  occurred  since  Comte. 
If  you  read  Mr.  Harrison,  and  if  you 
are  also,  as  I  presume  your  presence  here 
indicates,  saturated  with  that  new  wine  of 
more  spacious  knowledge  that  has  been 
given  the  world  during  the  last  fifty  years, 
you  will  have  been  greatly  impressed  by 
the  peculiar  limitations  of  the  positivist 
conception  of  the  future.  So  far  as  I  can 
gather,  Comte  was,  for  all  practical  pur- 
poses, totally  ignorant  of  that  remoter  past 
outside  the  past  that  is  known  to  us  by  his- 
tory, or  if  he  was  not  totally  ignorant  of 
its  existence,  he  was,  and  conscientiously 
remained,  ignorant  of  its  relevancy  to  the 
history  of  humanity.  In  the  narrow  and 
limited  past  he  recognized  men  had  always 
been  like  the  men  of  to-day;  in  the  future 
he  could  not  imagine  that  they  would  be 
anything  more  than  men  like  the  men  of 
to-day.  He  perceived,  as  we  all  perceive, 
that  the  old  social  order  was  breaking  up, 
47 


THE  DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

and  after  a  richly  suggestive  and  incom- 
plete analysis  of  the  forces  that  were 
breaking  it  up  he  set  himself  to  plan  a  new 
static  social  order  to  replace  it.  If  you  will 
read  Comte,  or,  what  is  much  easier  and 
pleasanter,  if  you  will  read  Mr.  Frederic 
Harrison,  you  will  find  this  conception  con- 
stantly apparent — that  there  was  once  a 
stable  condition  of  society  with  humanity, 
so  to  speak,  sitting  down  in  an  orderly  and 
respectable  manner;  that  humanity  has  been 
stirred  up  and  is  on  the  move,  and  that 
finally  it  will  sit  down  again  on  a  higher 
plane,  and  for  good  and  all,  cultured  and 
happy,  in  the  reorganized  positivist  state. 
And  since  he  could  see  nothing  beyond  man 
in  the  future,  there,  in  that  millennial  fash- 
ion, Comte  had  to  end.  Since  he  could  im- 
agine nothing  higher  than  man,  he  had  to 
assert  that  humanity,  and  particularly  the 
future  of  humanity,  was  the  highest  of  all 
conceivable  things. 
All  that  was  perfectly  comprehensible 
48 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

in  a  thinker  of  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  But  we  of  the  early  twen- 
tieth, and  particularly  that  growing  major- 
ity of  us  who  have  been  born  since  the 
Origin  of  Species  was  written,  have  no 
excuse  for  any  such  limited  vision.  Our 
imaginations  have  been  trained  upon  a  past 
in  which  the  past  that  Comte  knew  is 
scarcely  more  than  the  concluding  moment. 
We  perceive  that  man,  and  all  the  world 
of  men,  is  no  more  than  the  present  phase 
of  a  development  so  great  and  splendid 
that  beside  this  vision  epics  jingle  like  nur- 
sery rhymes,  and  all  the  exploits  of  human- 
ity shrivel  to  the  proportion  of  castles  in 
the  sand.  We  look  back  through  countless 
millions  of  years  and  see  the  will  to 
live  struggling  out  of  the  intertidal  slime, 
struggling  from  shape  to  shape  and  from 
power  to  power,  crawling  and  then  walk- 
ing confidently  upon  the  land,  struggling 
generation  after  generation  to  master  the 
air,  creeping  down  into  the  darkness  of  the 
49 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

deep;  we  see  it  turn  upon  itself  in  rage  and 
hunger  and  reshape  itself  anew;  we  watch 
it  draw  nearer  and  more  akin  to  us,  ex- 
panding, elaborating  itself,  pursuing  its 
relentless,  inconceivable  purpose,  until  at 
last  it  reaches  us  and  its  being  beats 
through  our  brains  and  arteries,  throbs  and 
thunders  in  our  battleships,  roars  through 
our  cities,  sings  in  our  music,  and  flowers 
in  our  art.  And  when,  from  that  retro- 
spect, we  turn  again  toward  the  future, 
surely  any  thought  of  finality,  any  millen- 
nial settlement  of  cultured  persons,  has 
vanished  from  our  minds. 

This  fact  that  man  is  not  final  is  the 
great  unmanageable,  disturbing  fact  that 
arises  upon  us  in  the  scientific  discovery 
of  the  future,  and  to  my  mind,  at  any  rate, 
the  question  what  is  to  come  after  man  is 
the  most  persistently  fascinating  and  the 
most  insoluble  question  in  the  whole 
world. 

Of  course  we  have  no  answer.  Such 
50 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF   THE   FUTURE 

imaginations  as  we  have  refuse  to  rise  to 
the  task. 

But  for  the  nearer  future,  while  man  is 
still  man,  there  are  a  few  general  state- 
ments that  seem  to  grow  more  certain.  It 
seems  to  be  pretty  generally  believed  to- 
day that  our  dense  populations  are  in  the 
opening  phase  of  a  process  of  diffusion  and 
aeration.  It  seems  pretty  inevitable  also 
that  at  least  the  mass  of  white  population 
in  the  world  will  be  forced  some  way  up 
the  scale  of  education  and  personal  effi- 
ciency in  the  next  two  or  three  decades. 
It  is  not  difficult  to  collect  reasons  for 
supposing — and  such  reasons  have  been 
collected — that  in  the  near  future,  in  a 
couple  of  hundred  years,  as  one  rash  op- 
timist has  written,  or  in  a  thousand  or  so, 
humanity  will  be  definitely  and  conscien- 
tiously organizing  itself  as  a  great  world 
state — a  great  world  state  that  will  purge 
from  itself  much  that  is  mean,  much  that 
is  bestial,  and  much  that  makes  for  indi- 
51 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

vidual  dullness  and  dreariness,  grayness 
and  wretchedness  in  the  world  of  to-day; 
and  although  we  know  that  there  is  noth- 
ing final  in  that  world  state,  although  we 
see  it  only  as  something  to  be  reached  and 
passed,  although  we  are  sure  there  will  be 
no  such  sitting  down  to  restore  and  perfect 
a  culture  as  the  positivists  foretell,  yet  few 
people  can  persuade  themselves  to  see  any- 
thing beyond  that  except  in  the  vaguest 
and  most  general  terms.  That  world  state  of 
more  vivid,  beautiful,  and  eventful  people 
is,  so  to  speak,  on  the  brow  of  the  hill,  and 
we  cannot  see  over,  though  some  of  us  can 
imagine  great  uplands  beyond  and  some- 
thing, something  that  glitters  elusively, 
taking  first  one  form  and  then  another, 
through  the  haze.  We  can  see  no  detail, 
we  can  see  nothing  definable,  and  it  is  sim- 
ply, I  know,  the  sanguine  necessity  of  our 
minds  that  makes  us  believe  those  uplands 
of  the  future  are  still  more  gracious  and 
splendid  than  we  can  either  hope  or  im- 

52 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

agine.     But  of  things  that  can  be  demon- 
strated we  have  none. 

Yet  I  suppose  most  of  us  entertain  cer- 
tain necessary  persuasions,  without  which 
a  moral  life  in  this  world  is  neither  a  reas- 
onable nor  a  possible  thing.  All  this  pa- 
per is  built  finally  upon  certain  negative 
beliefs  that  are  incapable  of  scientific  es- 
tablishment. Our  lives  and  powers  are 
limited,  our  scope  in  space  and  time  is 
limited,  and  it  is  not  unreasonable  that  for 
fundamental  beliefs  wc  must  go  outside  the 
sphere  of  reason  and  set  our  feet  upon 
faith.  Implicit  in  all  such  speculations  as 
this  is  a  very  definite  and  quite  arbitrary 
belief,  and  that  belief  is  that  neither  hu- 
manity nor  in  truth  any  individual  human 
being  is  living  its  life  in  vain.  And  it  is 
entirely  by  an  act  of  faith  that  we  must 
rule  out  of  our  forecasts  certain  possibili- 
ties, certain  things  that  one  may  consider 
improbable  and  against  the  chances,  but 
53 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF   THE   FUTURE 

that  no  one  upon  scientific  grounds  can  call 
impossible. 

One  must  admit  that  it  is  impossible  to 
show  why  certain  things  should  not  utterly 
destroy  and  end  the  entire  human  race  and 
story,  why  night  should  not  presently  come 
down  and  make  all  our  dreams  and  efforts 
vain.  It  is  conceivable,  for  example,  that 
some  great  unexpected  mass  of  matter 
should  presently  rush  upon  us  out  of  space, 
whirl  sun  and  planets  aside  like  dead 
leaves  before  the  breeze,  and  collide  with 
and  utterly  destroy  every  spark  of  life  up- 
on this  earth.  So  far  as  positive  human 
knowledge  goes,  this  is  a  conceivably  pos- 
sible thing.  There  is  nothing  in  science  to 
show  why  such  a  thing  should  not  be.  It 
is  conceivable,  too,  that  some  pestilence 
may  presently  appear,  some  new  disease, 
that  will  destroy,  not  lo  or  15  or  20  per 
cent,  of  the  earth's  inhabitants  as  pesti- 
lences have  done  in  the  past,  but  100  per 
cent;  and  so  end  our  race.  No  one,  speak- 
54 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE    FUTURE 

ing  from  scientific  grounds  alone,  can  say, 
"That  cannot  be."  And  no  one  can  dis- 
pute that  some  great  disease  of  the  atmos- 
phere, some  trailing  cometary  poison,  some 
great  emanation  of  vapor  from  the  interior 
of  the  earth,  such  as  Mr.  Shiel  has  made  a 
brilliant  use  of  in  his  "Purple  Cloud,"  is 
consistent  with  every  demonstrated  fact  in 
the  world.  There  may  arise  new  animals 
to  prey  upon  us  by  land  and  sea,  and  there 
may  come  some  drug  or  a  wrecking  mad- 
ness into  the  minds  of  men.  And  finally, 
there  is  the  reasonable  certainty  that  this 
sun  of  ours  must  radiate  itself  toward 
extinction;  that,  at  least,  must  happen;  it 
will  grow  cooler  and  cooler,  and  its  planets 
will  rotate  ever  more  sluggishly  until  some 
day  this  earth  of  ours,  tideless  and  slow 
moving,  will  be  dead  and  frozen,  and  all 
that  has  lived  upon  it  will  be  frozen  out 
and  done  with.  There  surely  man  must 
end.  That  of  all  such  nightmares  is  the 
most  insistently  convincing. 

55 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTTTRB 

And  yet  one  doesn't  believe  it. 

At  least  I  do  not.  And  I  do  not  believe 
in  these  things  because  I  have  come  to  be- 
lieve in  certain  other  things — in  the  co- 
herency and  purpose  in  the  world  and  in 
the  greatness  of  human  destiny.  Worlds 
may  freeze  and  suns  may  perish,  but  there 
stirs  something  within  us  now  that  can 
never  die  again. 

Do  not  misunderstand  me  when  I  speak 
of  the  greatness  of  human  destiny. 

If  I  may  speak  quite  openly  to  you,  I 
will  confess  that,  considered  as  a  final  pro- 
duct, I  do  not  think  very  much  of  myself 
or  (saving  your  presence)  my  fellow-crea- 
tures. I  do  not  think  I  could  possibly  join 
in  the  worship  of  humanity  with  any 
gravity  or  sincerity.  Think  of  it!  Think  of 
the  positive  facts.  There  are  surely  moods 
for  all  of  us  when  one  can  feel  Swift's 
amazement  that  such  a  being  should  deal  in 
pride.  There  are  moods  when  one  can  join 
in  the  laughter  of  Democritus;  and  they 
56 


THE   DISCOVERY   OF  THE   FUTURE 

would  come  oftener  were  not  the  spectacle 
of  human  littleness  so  abundantly  shot  with 
pain.  But  it  is  not  only  with  pain  that  the 
world  is  shot — it  is  shot  with  promise. 
Small  as  our  vanity  and  carnality  make  us, 
there  has  been  a  day  of  still  smaller  things. 
It  is  the  long  ascent  of  the  past  that  gives 
the  lie  to  our  despair.  We  know  now  that 
all  the  blood  and  passion  of  our  life  were 
represented  in  the  Carboniferous  time  by 
something  —  something,  perhaps,  cold- 
blooded and  with  a  clammy  skin,  that 
lurked  between  air  and  water,  and  fled  be- 
fore the  giant  amphibia  of  those  days. 

For  all  the  folly,  blindness,  and  pain  of 
our  lives,  we  have  come  some  way  from 
that.  And  the  distance  we  have  travelled 
gives  us  some  earnest  of  the  way  we  have 
yet  to  go. 

Why  should  things  cease  at  man?    Why 

should  not  this  rising  curve  rise  yet  more 

steeply    and    swiftly?      There    are    many 

things  to  suggest  that  we  are  now  in  a  phase 

57 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

of  rapid  and  unprecedented  development. 
The  conditions  under  which  men  live  are 
changing  with  an  ever-increasing  rapidity, 
and,  so  far  as  our  knowledge  goes,  no  sort 
of  creatures  have  ever  lived  under  chang- 
ing conditions  without  undergoing  the  pro- 
foundest  changes  themselves.  In  the  past 
century  there  was  more  change  in  the  condi- 
tions of  human  life  than  there  had  been  in 
the  previous  thousand  years.  A  hundred 
years  ago  inventors  and  investigators  were 
rare  scattered  men,  and  now  invention  and 
inquiry  are  the  work  of  an  unorganized 
army.  This  century  will  see  changes  that 
will  dwarf  those  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
as  those  of  the  nineteenth  dwarf  those  of 
the  eighteenth.  One  can  see  no  sign  any- 
where that  this  rush  of  change  will  be  over 
presently,  that  the  positivist  dream  of  a  so- 
cial reconstruction  and  of  a  new  static  cul- 
ture phase  will  ever  be  realized.  Human 
society  never  has  been  quite  static,  and  it 
will  presently  cease  to  attempt  to  be  static. 

58 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

Everything  seems  pointing  to  the  belief 
that  we  are  entering  upon  a  progress  that 
will  go  on,  with  an  ever-widening  and  ever 
more  confident  stride,  forever.  The  re- 
organization of  society  that  is  going  on 
now  beneath  the  traditional  appearance  of 
things  is  a  kinetic  reorganization.  We  are 
getting  into  marching  order.  We  have 
struck  our  camp  forever  and  we  are  out 
upon  the  roads. 

We  are  in  the  beginning  of  the  greatest 
change  that  humanity  has  ever  undergone. 
There  is  no  shock,  no  epoch-making  inci- 
dent— but  then  there  is  no  shock  at  a 
cloudy  daybreak.  At  no  point  can  we  say, 
"Here  it  commences,  now;  last  minute  was 
night  and  this  is  morning."  But  insensibly 
we  are  in  the  day.  If  we  care  to  look,  we 
can  foresee  growing  knowledge,  growing 
order,  and  presently  a  deliberate  improve- 
ment of  the  blood  and  character  of  the 
race.  And  what  we  can  see  and  imagine 
59 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

gives  us  a  measure  and  gives  us  faith  for 
what  surpasses  the  imagination. 

It  is  possible  to  believe  that  all  the  past 
is  but  the  beginning  of  a  beginning,  and 
that  all  that  is  and  has  been  is  but  the  twi- 
light of  the  dawn.  It  is  possible  to  believe 
that  all  that  the  human  mind  has  ever  ac- 
complished is  but  the  dream  before  the 
awakening.  We  cannot  see,  there  is  no 
need  for  us  to  see,  what  this  world  will  be 
like  when  the  day  has  fully  come.  We  are 
creatures  of  the  twilight.  But  it  is  out  of 
our  race  and  lineage  that  minds  will 
spring,  that  will  reach  back  to  us  in  our 
littleness  to  know  us  better  than  we  know 
ourselves,  and  that  will  reach  forward 
fearlessly  to  comprehend  this  future  that 
defeats  our  eyes. 

All  this  world  is  heavy  with  the  promise 
of  greater  things,  and  a  day  will  come,  one 
day  in  the  unending  succession  of  days, 
when  beings,  beings  who  are  now  latent  in 
our  thoughts  and  hidden  in  our  loins,  shall 

60 


THE   DISCOVERY  OF  THE   FUTURE 

stand  upon  this  earth  as  one  stands  upon  a 
footstool,  and  shall  laugh  and  reach  out 
their  hands  amid  the  stars. 


6l 


THE  ART  of  LIFE  SERIES 

EDWARD     HOWARD     GRIGGS.     Editor 

"  The  aim  of  this  series  of  brief  books  is  to  illuminate 
the  never-to-be-finished  art  of  living.  There  is  no  thought 
of  solving  the  problems  or  giving  dogmatic  theories  of  con- 
duct. Rather  the  purpose  is  to  bring  together  in  brief  form 
the  thoughts  of  some  wise  minds  and  the  insight  and  appre- 
ciation of  some  deep  characters,  trained  in  the  actual  world 
of  experience  but  attaining  a  vision  of  life  in  clear  and  wide 
perspective.  Such  books  should  act  as  a  challenge  to  the 
reader's  own  mind,  bringing  him  to  a  clearer  recognition  of 
the  problems  of  his  life  and  the  laws  governing  them,  deep- 
ening his  insight  into  the  wonder  and  meaning  of  life  and 
developing  an  attitude  of  appreciation  that  may  make  possi- 
ble the  wise  and  earnest  facing  of  the  deeps,  dark  or  beauti- 
ful, in  the  life  of  the  personal  spirit. — From  the  Editor's 
Introduction  to  the  Series, printed  in  fullin  '■^The  Use  of 
the  Margin" 

Volumes  ready: 

WHERE  KNOWLEDGE  FAILS        .       .         By  Earl  Barnes 

THE  SIXTH  SENSE.    Its  cultlvabon  and  use.    By  Charles  H.  Brent 

THE  BURDEN  OF  POVERTY         .  By  Charles  F.  Dole 

What  to  do 

HUMAN  EQUIPMENT        .        .        By  Edward  Howard  Griggs 
Its  use  and  abuse 

THE  USE  OF   THE   MARGIN  .        By  Edward  Howard  Griggs 

THINGS   WORTH   WHILE       By  Thomas  Wenlworth  Higginson 

SELF-MEASUREMENT         .         .  By  William  DeWitt  Hyde 

A  scale  of  human  values  with  directions  for  personal  application 

THE  SUPER  RACE.      An  American  problem.       By  Scott  Nearing 

PRODUCT   AND   CLIMAX         .  By  Simon  Nelson  Patten 

LATTER  DAY  SINNERS  AND  SAINTS 

By  Edward  Abworth  Ross 

Each  50  cents  net ;  by  mail,  53  cents 
To  be  had  of  all  booksellers  or  the  publisher 

B.  W.  HUEBSCH 

225  Fifth  avenue  New  York 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  UBRARY  FAOUTY 

A     000  689  459     6 


